Pagan Culture - My Path

Meet Holly Golightly

Welcome to ALL ABOUT YOU. Our featured reader this issue is HOLLY GOLIGHTLY who inked the great cartoons at the top of our columns and illustrated the fiction piece in this issue “When the Veils are Thin.” Holly is a Comicbook artist and writer and currently works on Sabrina the teenage witch; Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose; and 3Little Kittens: Purrrfect Weapons. We asked her to tell us about herself.

The Craft has been around me in some form all my life. I began reading the Tarot when I was eight, with my mother’s deck. She got it from a ring of white witches, but she didn’t like me playing with it, so I always snuck out the deck and did it when she wasn’t home. I didn’t always know exactly what everything meant, but I knew it stirred something inside. By age eleven, I knew I was a Witch; it was just an instinct that lead me there. I never grew up thinking this was ‘deviant’ or ‘wrong.’ I just knew I was different.

My Thelema

My Thelema

Orgies. Sacrifices. Black magic. Murder. All associated with Aleister Crowley on newspaper headings throughout the United Kingdom during his lifetime. The February 25, 1923 headline of The Sunday Express read, “The Sinister Revelations of Aleister Crowley.” Famously the magazine John Bull declared Crowley,”The Wickedest Man in the World”. Who is Aleister Crowley to me? The founder of the Path I follow today: Thelema. Naturally, it’s necessary to look past this glittery wrapping in order to understand Crowley, and the Path he founded.

That Was Then, This is Now: The Magic of Personal Responsibility

In the spring of 1996 an elderly friend (who happened to be a witch) and I exchanged words back and forth in our favorite Middle Eastern restaurant. We’d had our meal, paid up, and were talking as friends do, over a final cup of tea. I was complaining about life: I was tired of working seven days a week in a job that I was completely burned out on. Life had another plan for the man I desired, and the man I didn’t desire wouldn’t go away!

My friend, a very wise woman, sat there for a while and listened to me rant before she interrupted. “What is your part in all this?” she inquired gently. I sat there, defenses up, but speechless, so she continued. “Your circumstances may seem out of control, but they are all connected to the past. If you see your part in the past and resolve your issues, things will change for you.”

Why I'm Not Heathen

Why I’m Not Heathen

In 1973, Iceland declared Asatru — their name for those who worshiped the Gods of the ancient Norse and Germanic peoples — to be a legal faith. This decision set off a flurry of growth and activity in the U.S. as well. Asatru groups appeared, fought, split off, and formed anew in every state.

After a couple of decades, things seem to crystallize. The new byword became “reconstructionist”, meaning a Pagan who sought to reconstruct an ancient religion – in this case, Iron Age to early medieval Norse/Germanic/Anglo-Saxon religion — as accurately as possible.